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Protest Grows Over Censoring of China Paper

Protesters gathered on Monday outside the headquarters of the relatively liberal newspaper Southern Weekend in Guangzhou, China.Credit
James Pomfret/Reuters

BEIJING — Hundreds of people gathered outside the headquarters of a newspaper company in southern China on Monday, intensifying a battle over media censorship that poses a test of the willingness of China’s new leadership to tolerate calls for change.

The demonstration was an outpouring of support for journalists at the relatively liberal newspaper Southern Weekend, who erupted in fury late last week over what they called overbearing interference by local propaganda officials.

At the same time, the embattled newsroom received backing on the Internet from celebrities and other prominent commentators that turned what began as a local censorship dispute into a national display of solidarity.

“Hoping for a spring in this harsh winter,” Li Bingbing, an actress, said to her 19 million followers on a microblog account. Yao Chen, an actress with more than 31 million followers, quoted Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian dissident: “One word of truth outweighs the whole world.”

Disputes between media organizations and local party leaders over the limits of reporting and expressions of opinion are common in China, but rarely emerge into public view. This time, calls to support the frustrated journalists spread quickly in Chinese online forums over the weekend, and those who showed up on Monday outside the media offices in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, ran the gamut from high school and university students to retirees.

Many carried banners scrawled with slogans and white and yellow chrysanthemums, a flower that symbolizes mourning. One banner read: “Get rid of censorship. The Chinese people want freedom.” Police officers watched, but did not interfere.

The journalists at Southern Weekend have been calling for the ouster of Tuo Zhen, the top propaganda official in Guangdong Province, who took up his post last May.

They blame him for overseeing a change in a New Year’s editorial that originally called for greater respect for constitutional rights under the headline “China’s Dream, the Dream of Constitutionalism.”

The editorial went through layers of changes and ultimately became one praising the direction of the current political system, in which the Communist Party continues to exercise authority over all aspects of governance.

A well-known entrepreneur, Hung Huang, said online that the actions of Mr. Tuo had “destroyed, overnight, all the credibility the country’s top leadership had labored to re-establish since the 18th Party Congress,” the November gathering in Beijing that was the climax of the leadership transition installing Xi Jinping as Communist Party chief. Mr. Xi, who is also scheduled to assume the nation’s presidency in March, has raised expectations that he might pursue a more open-minded approach to molding China’s economic and political models during his planned decade-long tenure.

But more recently, he has said China must respect its socialist roots, which appeared to be a move to placate conservatives in the party.

One journalist for Southern Weekend said Monday night that talks between the various parties had taken place that afternoon, but there were no results to announce. “The negotiations did not go well at all,” the journalist said in a telephone interview.

Signs had emerged earlier that central propaganda officials were moving to dismantle support for the protest. A fiery editorial by Global Times, a populist newspaper, attacked the rebels at Southern Weekend and essentially accused them of conspiring against the government. Xinhua, the state news agency, and other prominent news sites published the editorial online, apparently at the orders of propaganda officials.

“Propaganda is still on the old road,” said an editor at a party media organization.

But by Tuesday morning, the news portals run by large Internet companies like Sina and Sohu rather than by the state had posted disclaimers with the Global Times editorial, saying the opinions did not reflect those of the companies.

It was on the Internet where the campaign to support the beleaguered journalists was reaching full bloom. Bloggers with large readerships, Han Han and Li Chengpeng, urged defiance of press censorship, and calls spread on microblogs for more rallies outside the newspaper offices on Tuesday.

It was unclear how many employees in the Southern Weekend newsroom had heeded calls by reporters for a strike to display their determination to resist censorship. A local journalist who went by the newspaper’s Beijing office on Monday said the building appeared to be open, but quiet. One employee at the site, where about 30 people work, told the journalist that the office was not on strike.

Around 2 a.m. on Tuesday, three women and two men in their 20s walked up to the newspaper headquarters in Guangzhou and took cellphone photos of one another holding a handwritten cardboard sign that said, “Tuo Zhen, go home.”

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“Everyone in Guangdong Province knows Tuo Zhen is a bad guy,” said one of the men, who declined to give his name for security reasons.

Outspoken intellectuals have circulated an online petition demanding Mr. Tuo’s removal. Mr. Tuo could not be reached for comment on Monday.

Besides being a weather vane that could reveal the direction of Mr. Xi and the new party leadership, the tensions at Southern Weekend could pose a serious test for Hu Chunhua, Guangdong’s new party chief and a potential candidate to succeed Mr. Xi as China’s leader in a decade.

Mr. Hu’s predecessor, Wang Yang, was labeled a “reformer” by many Western political analysts, but he presided over a tightening of media freedoms in the province, and specifically over the Nanfang Media Group, the parent company of Southern Weekend and other publications. Mr. Hu, 43, is a rising star in the party who got a Politburo seat in November and is a protégé of Hu Jintao, Mr. Xi’s colorless and conservative predecessor.

There appears to be some tension in the party propaganda apparatus over how to handle the situation.

On Monday, People’s Daily, a party-controlled newspaper, ran a signed commentary that said propaganda officials should “follow the rhythm of the times” and help the authorities establish a “pragmatic and open-minded image.” Some people have interpreted this as encouragement for a more enlightened approach in dealing with the news media.

But the scathing editorial by Global Times reflected a conflicting and perhaps more official line on the uprising at Southern Weekend, since by Monday night it had been reprinted on several major news Web sites.

The editorial said Southern Weekend is merely a newspaper and should not challenge the system, as it appeared to be doing. It criticized the newspaper’s supporters, including Chen Guangcheng, the rights advocate persecuted by Chinese officials, who fled to the United States last year.

“Even in the West,” it said, “mainstream media would not choose to openly pick a fight with the government.”

In Washington, the State Department said Monday that media censorship is incompatible with China’s aspirations to build a modern information-based economy and society. A department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said the Chinese were now strongly taking up their right to freedom of speech. “We hope the government is taking notice,” she said at a news briefing, according to The Associated Press.

The conflict at Southern Weekend was exacerbated Sunday night by top officials at the newspaper who said on the publication’s official microblog that the New Year’s editorial had been written with the consent of editors.

According to an online account on Monday, that statement was made after pressure was exerted by Yang Jian, the deputy provincial propaganda official who last year was appointed head of the party committee at Nanfang Media Group.

Southern Weekend’s acting editor in chief, Huang Can, then pressed an employee to give up the microblog password so the statement could be posted.

Neither Mr. Yang nor Mr. Huang could be reached for comment on Monday.

​Clarification: Earlier versions of two photo captions with this article referred to the newspaper as Southern Weekly. Southern Weekend is the literal translation of the Chinese name, while Southern Weekly is the adopted English-language name.

A version of this article appears in print on January 8, 2013, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Protest Grows Over Censoring Of China Paper. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe